Handbrake is now 64-bit aware, and faster

The Handbrake media converter team has recently released a new, updated version – 0.9.4. They often go months without site updates, and the version number bump suggests the new release is a bugfix update. Nothing could be farther from the truth – the team claims more than 1000 changes have been made since the last release.

The two most interesting changes to me are the media formats and the soft subtitle support. Handbrake has updated their media profiles and default format outputs to better support Apple devices (iPhones, iPods and AppleTV’s), creating smaller, higher quality files H.264 files by default. I can personally attest that that video quality is top-notch on an iPhone 3G, and encoding time is quick. As an added bonus, the ‘constant quality’ encoding dispenses with the need for two-pass encoding, cutting time in half. On the flip side, they have also dropped a number of profiles that caused problems or flat out didn’t work. I for one never got the files created with the ‘XBox 360′ profile to look good enough to really enjoy, but some users did, and they will have to work out the best profiles for their devices.

The other big change is the support for soft subtitles. In the past, the only way to subtitle a video was to ‘burn’ the subtitles into the video, which actually embedded the text in the video stream. This was incredibly irritating. Now, encoded subtitle data can be turned on or off – and multiple tracks are supported, so you can grab the English and the Arabic subtitles (where offered).

A final note: the new version is 64-bit aware if you are running an Intel-based Mac, and my experience bears out the team’s claim that Handbrake is roughly %10 faster with running it in 64-bit mode. I’m averaging 110fps on my MacPro, where the previous version was usually hitting it’s upper limit around 95 fps, which is close to a %15 improvement for me. That said, getting 64-bit mode working is somewhat trying – if you use the 64-bit Handbrake client, and don’t have a 64-bit version of the VideoLan client installed, you get the following error:

To make things just a little more frustrating, the VLC team is still working out some bugs in the 64-bit code, so there isn’t always a 64-bit version to download. There wasn’t a 64-bit 1.0.3 release at all, and the 1.0.2 release isn’t as stable as I would like. If you are brave, and really want the faster encoding times, you can browse older releases, or download the vlc-1.0.2-intel64.dmg directly.

Apart from the VLC issue, this is a very solid release that adds a number of features that will soon be seen as must-haves for anyone trying to grow their media library, or convert media for use on their portable devices.

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